For Fun - Sony A7 MIII w/ 24-70mm 2.8GM versus Samsung S20 64MP

Just for the heck of it, since the Samsung S20 is promoting a 64MP capable camera; I decided to pit it up against my A7 MIII. Not a long photoshoot and all settings were default on both "devices".

On the S20 the picture mode was simply set to 64MP and no other settings where adjusted.

For the A7 MIII it was placed in Auto mode.

The only adjustments made was cropping to the same image size.

The phone's images look amazingly good, too bad you cant change the lenses on it

AUP wrote:

Just for the heck of it, since the Samsung S20 is promoting a 64MP capable camera; I decided to pit it up against my A7 MIII.

About what I'd expect.

The S20 is doing remarkably well for the sensor it uses. However, the images do look significantly more "processed" than from the A7III, and the A7III shadow detail is much cleaner. Still, it's not a huge difference for a camera costing twice as much and using a much larger sensor.

For what it's worth, small sensors have long been surprisingly competitive in good lighting (e.g., the old PowerShot S70 actually outperformed the original EOS digital Rebel with the kit zoom). The extra nudge in quality of current cell phones is primarily from heavy computational processing, which is getting less obvious artifacting all the time.

I have to say the S20 did surprisingly well, particularly in terms of capture details. The corners also look pretty sharp.

One advantage I notice is that the sky is not blown out in the second picture in the S20, like it is on the Sony. Is that due to the S20 combining multiple exposures?

I agree that the S20's biggest problem is that the pictures are over-processed. I bet that if you shot it in RAW and ran it through the normal post-processing, the images would be very respectable.

Edgar_in_Indy wrote:

I have to say the S20 did surprisingly well, particularly in terms of capture details. The corners also look pretty sharp.

One advantage I notice is that the sky is not blown out in the second picture in the S20, like it is on the Sony. Is that due to the S20 combining multiple exposures?

I don't think the A7III sky is quite blown, but it isn't as heavily tone mapped. Turn the DRO up and the tone mapping will be more similar for the sky....

I agree that the S20's biggest problem is that the pictures are over-processed. I bet that if you shot it in RAW and ran it through the normal post-processing, the images would be very respectable.

I think in raw the S20 will look nasty. It's actually hard to duplicate the quality level that built-in postprocessing is using for the JPEGs.

ProfHankD wrote:

I think in raw the S20 will look nasty. It's actually hard to duplicate the quality level that built-in postprocessing is using for the JPEGs.

Perhaps, but I've almost always gotten better results working with the RAW files.

OP, do you have the RAW files you could post? Or if not, could you do another similar test with RAWs? I love playing around with this kind of stuff!

I'm waiting for the post processing used in phones to become available on my PC.  I don't think all the potential of a digital image are being exploited, some companies like Topaz are starting to. Of course, it sells more cameras that way.